Few modern film-makers can combine visceral thrills and intelligent substance as dextrously as Paul Greengrass. Having refined his trademark faux-vérité style through such gripping docudramas as Bloody Sunday, this astonishingly energetic director successfully infiltrated the mainstream with his action-packed Bourne sequels, giving the then-flagging Bond franchise a run for its money. Now with Green Zone he deftly dovetails the disparate strands of his career to conjure a nail-biting war movie (inspired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone) that is big on crowd-pleasing excitement while still packing a popularist political punch.

Posted to Iraq to seek out invasion-justifying weapons of mass destruction, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) finds only dead ends and duff information. When complaints to his superiors fall on closed ears (even the media seem to be carelessly complicit in a would-be cover-up), Miller goes off-message, discovering for himself that nothing in warfare is as simple as it seems. Released in UK cinemas in the wake of the Chilcot inquiry (which itself boasted several Oscar-worthy performances), this meaty actioner conjures an air of incompetence and untruthfulness in which all motives are murky and expediency repeatedly trumps national self-examination. Damon is well cast as the good-hearted grunt who is constantly surprised by deviousness (check out the "Ready for Action" featurette, which confirms his "solid good bloke" status) while Jason Isaacs is in scene-stealing form as the handsomely mustachioed military hard nut who becomes his nemesis. Ample extras include a lively commentary track from the director and star, who seem to genuinely enjoy each other's hugely profitable company.

"Ten years have passed between the events of Happiness and Life During Wartime," says writer-director Todd Solondz of the (non-) sequel to his most infamous hit, "but I prefer not to be beholden to the literalness of time or circumstance." What this means, in effect, is that Solondz has assembled a "totally different cast" to revisit characters, some of whom "have aged five years, some 20; some histories have been altered; I have allowed race not to be something set in stone". Solondz has, of course, played such games before in the abysmal Palindromes in which disparate actors played a single character – with headache-inducingly arty results. Thankfully, Life During Wartime has no such internal incoherence, offering instead an uncharacteristically forgiving update of the awful events of yore. Barely concealed anxiety is once again the primary register, with characters teetering always upon the brink of hysteria, none more so than the deceased Andy (a rheumy-eyed Paul Reubens), whose attempts at post-mortal reconciliation with the ironically named Joy (Shirley Henderson) descend into screaming recrimination – apparently he's an asshole in the afterlife too. The most toe-curling scenes, however, are reserved for Allison Janney's Trish, whose "child-friendly" explanation of her body's response to her new boyfriend goes beyond the inappropriate into the realms of the unbearable. Solondz may be an unreliable film-maker (he has never fully delivered on the early promise of Welcome to the Dollhouse) but he has an ear for the excruciating that never hears a bum note.

Having invaded cinemas in time for the annual 14 February rom-com barf-fest, Leap Year and Valentine's Day now form a home-viewing marriage-made-in-hell, shipping up on DVD shelves together like a pair of vomit-encrusted greeting cards. Both are soul-crushing fare, although Leap Year is perhaps the greater offender considering director Anand Tucker's previously solid work on When Did You Last See Your Father? and TV's Red Riding trilogy. If you've seen the trailer for this depressingly predictable farrago then believe me you've seen the movie – few adverts have so comprehensively covered all the plot twists of a so-called "coming attraction". A clearly embarrassed Matthew Goode is laughable (but not in a good way) as the burly Oirish rogue who seems to have studied Faith and Begorrah Blarney at the Top of the Mornin' Academy for Aspiring Leprechauns and Loveable Screen Guinness Drinkers. Amy Adams is no better as the uptight American beauty who travels to Dublin to propose to her dithering twit boyfriend but winds up being seduced by four-leafed clovers and fiddle-dee-dee finger-in-the-ear folksiness. Or something. It's horrible. As for Valentine's Day, you get what you'd expect – more of the same from garrulous director Garry Marshall, who struck gold with Pretty Woman 20 years ago and has been struggling to repeat that baffling success ever since. This star-studded string of interweaving stories (featuring Julia Roberts, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Alba, Ashton Kutcher and more) apes Love Actually in its rambling structure, but Marshall makes Richard Curtis look like the leanest, meanest film-maker in town. Pass me the sickbag.

With such flatulent drivel around, thank heaven for Lourdes, the enigmatic third feature from Austrian director Jessica Hausner, who apprenticed under Michael Haneke as script supervisor on his gruelling Funny Games. This U-certificate oddity may lack the rough edges of her earlier work (it "contains no material likely to offend", say the censors, except the "brief sight of a woman smoking at a bar"!) but the growing sense of mystery and unease is often both disorientating and disconcerting. Sylvie Testud excels as the young woman confined to a wheelchair who joins a pilgrimage that tests the faith of both her and those around her. Unobtrusive location photography boosts this strange investigation of the morality of miracles, the power of pilgrimage and the fairness (or otherwise) of faith healing. Most impressively the film won both the Catholic Signis award and the secular Brian award (named after Python's Life of Brian) when it premiered at Venice last year – how's that for a "broad church" appeal?